Modeling the Effect of Temperature on Microalgal Growth under Outdoor Conditions

Many factors affect the growth of microalgae among which temperature and light intensity are amongst the most important factors. While these two factors heavily influence the growth in outdoor microalgae cultures such as open ponds, they also have a significant correlation in this environment which makes studying their effects separately rather difficult. A method has been introduced in this paper which models the effect of temperature on long-teun growth of microalgae based on the assumption that the effect of light and temperature are independent and can be separated. This method was obtained by binning the data and using the derivatives of the growth to eliminate the effect of light. For this study, long-teun growth of Tetraselmis sp. grown in Murdoch University, Perth, Australia was used. The result showed that the calculated temperature function is similar to what has been reported in the literature for other types of microalgae. Although raw data did not show any decline in growth at high temperatures due to the increase in light exposure, the proposed model successfully demonstrated this effect and confirmed that elevated temperature can lower the growth of microalgae.